Clutter. Cheryl Chandler suggested this topic quite a while ago upon the occasion of her experience in cleaning out her house. She said “Clear my house, clear my head.” That started me thinking about clutter: the purposes it serves, the ways in which it does not serve us, and how hard the whole subject is to deal with. One of my goals is to live a simple life with an affluent spirit. (Ayako Isayama) Yet I continually find pockets of clutter, cluttering up that simple life. This clutter is material, but it is also mental, emotional and spiritual. Clutter is almost a life style. What is that all about? There many reasons why we accumulate clutter in our houses, in our cars, in our offices, in our minds. One is the very real fact of not enough. Not enough time to put things away; not enough places for the things to go. Not enough quiet to listen; not enough energy to do. Some of us are busy; some of us are very busy; some of us are too busy. We don't have enough time and we don't have enough space, literally and figuratively, and so our lives become very cluttered. Clutter is our life style. We may not like it but it feels as though it is here to stay.
In addition to the outside forces bringing clutter into our lives, it also serves some very real needs and some very real purposes. Many of us have a need for security, or a need for comfort, or a need for abundance. In order to fill that need we surround ourselves with things because they seem to make us feel safe and rich. When my aunt found a sweater or a blouse that she liked she would buy it in every color the store had. I think it made her feel secure. Why do I have a growing collection of Buddha statues? They give me comfort. (PS-I just found a great one to put outside the house.) Many of us have a need to feel powerful and to feel free and to feel in control of our lives. Sometimes clutter serves those needs as well. Why buy books or CD’s or DVD’s when we have a perfectly good library system in the Hudson Valley? Partly because when we own them we can fold the pages back and keep them as long as we want. We have the luxury of listening, or seeing, or reading whenever we want, even if that is only once in our lifetime. Why have more than three pairs of jeans, three pairs of shoes, two sets of sheets? Is it partly because we feel abundance and power when we can wear something different each day? Why, if we use an average of one or two cans a month, buy ten cans of tomato sauce when it’s on sale 5/$1.00? Do we feel as though we’ve beaten the system somehow? So the clothes don’t fit in the closet, the food in the pantry or the books in the shelves. How much comfort, or security, or power, or freedom do you take from your clutter?
Sometimes we can use clutter as a distraction from what we want to avoid. When I was discussing this topic with a friend, also a UU minister, she said “ How else would one keep from getting necessary work done? Where else could you lose yourself, your time and important items like keys?” If we're constantly losing things and spending time looking for them for instance, it becomes a lot easier not to have time for that difficult conversation or that difficult task. Sometimes we can use clutter as a barrier, or protection from other people and even from life itself. Some people will not invite others to their home because they think their home is too cluttered. Maybe they feel some embarrassment, or maybe they hesitate because they think other people will judge them, or maybe it's a way to protect against anyone getting too close. Some of us are perfectionists. We do not tackle the clutter unless we think we have enough time to totally clear it out, once and for all. That too becomes an avoidance. Sometimes clutter prevents us from moving on with our lives. Have you ever tried to throw out anything or give away anything that belonged to your child or partner? Or perhaps someone has tried to de-clutter your stuff? Even when you, or he/she has long outgrown the game or never plays with the toys, the sports equipment, the what-not anymore? The usual answer is no don't give that away, don't throw that out, I still want that, I may need that. I moved out of the house I grew up in when I was 18 years old. But I left some stuff there, as any good young adult does. So four years later, when the house suffered fire damage and my mother had to move suddenly and packed up in a hurry and I lived two thousand miles from her, she gave away my records and my game of Clue and Parchesi. And I was upset! It's almost a holding onto something that has already passed. What does our clutter protect us from?
Our self-identity is bound up with our clutter. All those items we have a sentimental attachment to. All those items from people no longer with us, from our past. I only recently got rid of the notes I made when researching my dissertation in the 1970's. A Greek scholar is who I am. Without the notes, how can I be sure? On the other hand, if our self-identity is less clear to us, or we are pulled in many directions and find it hard to set goals and priorities, the diversity of our clutter can reflect that as well. Finally, some of us like to solve problems, or like to be the one who knows, or even like to be the hero, or the savior of a situation. We take pleasure in taming chaos; we respond well to crisis. We will come in and organize clutter, our own or yours, and we are effective. But we are not as enthusiastic about maintaining the order we might bring. Unconsciously, or through habit energy, we don’t maintain. Or we create systems that are too difficult to maintain. We wait for chaos to come again, we, unwittingly perhaps, open the door for it to come again, so that again we will get a rush from dealing with it. Clutter reasserting itself gives us that opportunity.
You see, clutter serves many purposes and fills many needs. And you thought you just didn’t know what to do with your stuff! Some of us treat our propensity for cluttering as though it was a moral failing, or at least a personality flaw, or something to be confessed with an embarrassed smile. We look upon the organized with envy and longing. In our “informal” culture we have assigned a certain morality to clutter. We can buy into attitudes like a messy desk is a sign of a messy mind, or a cluttered house is a dirty house. (Of course then one asks, what does an empty desk say about the mind?) Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, says that clutter may refer to any of the following: “excessiveness and physical disorder; a confusing or disorderly state or collection; or the creation thereof.” That’s not a description of something we might aspire to. It goes on. “Excessive, unnecessary or uncontrolled clutter in a home or office is a sign of compulsive hoarding.” It goes on. Scientifically, clutter is “a type of light pollution (and it refers to) unwanted echoes in electronic systems, particularly in reference to radars . . . . (Re the market, clutter describes) the extreme amount of advertisements or products the average American consumer comes into contact with.” But clutter is even more complex than all of this. On the personal, even cultural level, it is more than simply negative traits or habits. Indeed, the negative connotations get in the way of really looking at clutter and understanding the roles it plays in our lives.
Albert Einstein described “Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”
What happens if we stop beating ourselves up because we have clutter and instead uncover what that clutter means? What do we learn about ourselves? Might we find a way to manage it, live with it, get rid of it? There’s something to be said for keeping the clutter under control – physically as well as spiritually and emotionally. Clear my house, clear my head.
Zazen When I first floundered in no one knew me not even myself staggering under a Saratoga trunk crammed with humiliations bottled like urine samples nailed kegs of anger carbons of abusive letters chemistry quizzes with F's even the horse I never had two casseroles leftover from the dime-a-dip supper. No one remarked that I had brought too much. I was wearing three fur hats donated by opulent cousins my feet encased in cement ever since the failure of the patio project and my mouth full of barbs as an old trout. No one praised my appearance. The trunk fell off my back disgorging it's unusual contents at my stone feet which also came off. The fur hats tumbled like a motheaten avalanche burying a small monk. No one noticed. My sweat began to dry I folded myself into one piece ... (Virginia Hamilton Adair)
My life is very full. It bulges with many people, many tasks, many demands. That’s okay–I like it that way. However, because it is such, I want the places I live and work in to be non-cluttered. I need not to have every surface covered because I need to look around and see empty space. I need to have things in relative order because I appreciate the calmness of that. The beauty and the peace of my space, created by all of its components: the colors, the decorations, the furniture, the open areas, give me a sense of beauty and peace and harmony. That has a spiritual importance to me. My outward surroundings both influence and mirror my inner landscape. I’m happy. Clutter is like a river stirred up by a hurricane. For some time after the water looks brown, as the mud from the bottom has been disturbed and swirls closer to the surface. Un-cluttering is the calming; the settling of the mud to the depths again, restoring clearness to the surface of the water. It’s a meditation. Clear my house, clear my spirit.
And it’s not only spiritual. Mentally, when I'm not overwhelmed by clutter I feel a certain order, a sense of being on top of things. I feel a creative efficiency. Creative and efficient. My thoughts flow and I am engaged. You know, whenever I sit down to write a sermon I have to clean off my desk first. Accomplish those small tasks, put the bigger ones away neatly for another time. Literally, I need an uncluttered space in order to think deeply and coherently. The lack of distractions allows me to concentrate, to pay attention, to let what is important emerge. Clear my desk, clear my mind. Emotionally, clutter can be a hindrance to relationships, while de-cluttering can help to maintain them. Often one person really minds it when the other leaves his/her stuff all over the common areas. One person really minds when he/she picks up after the other because it is important to have a calm, peaceful, beautiful space. It can feel disrespectful of shared areas and a disregard of what is important to one. I mean “stuff” both literally and figuratively here. It’s hard to be present for others if one is crammed completely full of one’s own self. Physical, mental, emotional clutter can eat away at relationships.
Un-cluttering can also assist us in moving through transitions. My mother lived with me when she had a stroke. It quickly became apparent that she would not be coming home but rather moving to a nursing home where she could receive the level of care she needed. I found myself cleaning out her bedroom – moving the furniture, gathering her clothing together – even before she was released from the hospital. To my family I seemed to be acting prematurely, but the clearing out helped me to accept that life as we knew it was irrevocably changed. It helped me to better face what was to come, a physical symbol of change. I know it doesn’t work that way for everyone. I know that some of us do not want to clear out the space of loved ones who have gone; it only adds to the loss. I know. But for me, clear my house, clear my heart. We’re on a continuum when it comes to clutter. We each can function with different amounts of it, and that’s cool. However, when it begins to get in the way, we might ask ourselves what purposes and needs our clutter serves. Is our self-identity bound up with our things? Do we use them to hold onto the past, or a past self? Does our clutter distract us from something we want to avoid? Does it protect us from others getting too close? Does it give us a sense of abundance, of security? Is it comforting? Does it offer a sense of power and freedom? Is it our habit to feel at our best when combating chaos? Clutter becomes a problem when it gets in the way of our life goals, our relationships, our work, our happiness. Clutter is not a personal moral failing. Rather it provides information about what’s going on within ourselves. The pleasures of keeping clutter within limits are spiritual, mental and emotional. We open up a certain spaciousness where the spirit can breathe, the mind focus and the heart feel. It’s also an opportunity to use fewer of the world’s resources, perhaps doing some good for the planet and its various living beings, as well as other people. What does your clutter say about you? What do you want it to say?
There’s a Spanish proverb that you can talk about bulls but you don’t know anything until you’ve been in the bull ring. Enough clutter about clutter.